On Mar 23, 2015, at 9:52 AM, Heiko W.Rupp <hrupp(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
> What I meant is that we shouldn't care about how the data is stored, if
> it's a counter, a gauge, a string. It's a "value point" in time.
While I think it is good to separate the storage from the semantics,
I do not think we should not care how it is stored.
For counters, which are integral values, we should probably not
store them as double.
Similar, a log line should not be stored as double either :-)
>
> What matters is how we query this data. For example, if you're working
> with a counter you'll probably be interested in applying a derivative
> function.
Yes
The semantics of metric type are precisely about querying. The type information tells us
which aggregation functions to apply to the data points. And these functions should be
utilized in both ad-hoc queries as well as the generation of pre-computed
aggregates/rollups; however, I am not suggesting that this should preclude the use of
other functions.